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It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 16 Review

The sixteenth season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is another strong outing for this amazing show. It wasn’t as terrific as its superb predecessor, but it was still a strong season.

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“Gutter ball!“

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This season has just eight episodes, which is an annoyingly small number, but here we go. The Gang Inflates isn’t the best episode of the bunch, but it does feature a very fun dynamic between Mac and Dennis and a fun commentary on economic recession. It’s a pleasant episode that is overall quite solid, but most of the characters do not quite get to shine here.

Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang finds Charlie and Mac on a quest to get their inheritances, which yields some interesting discoveries about one of Mac’s cousins. I found this storyline very intriguing, but how Charlie was depicted throughout this season as overly smart and competent was very much out of character for him. The highlight of this episode was Dennis and Dee trying to make Frank take away his gun, which led to so many amusing situations. This was the best moment for Frank this season.

The Gang Gets Cursed builds up the story to a very satisfactory conclusion that explained every single occurrence before very neatly, but the overall episode left a lot to be desired in the laugh ratio. It’s a very good episode that isn’t the funniest one in this slate.

Frank vs. Russia, yes, has some great moments with Frank competing at chess. The final scene was grotesque and Danny DeVito should be congratulated for even agreeing to play it. However, the highlight here was the other storyline where Dennis thought Mac and Dee how to find a man. This was pretty much a glorious repeat of his D.E.N.N.I.S. System, and it was so hilarious to witness this updated take on the formula.

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Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab is a pretty solid episode that made great use of Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston in the guest roles. Their toxic, abusive relationship was hilariously portrayed and both of them excelled at playing supposedly themselves. I just wished that the gang got more to do here.

Risk E. Rat’s Pizza and Amusement Center is one of the two surprisingly political episodes of this season. This one focuses on excessive safety precautions for children and how political correctness has ruined fun. The creators cleverly pinpoint the differences between the different generations when it comes to social behavior. It’s a smart episode that has the issue that many episodes this season faced – it wasn’t truly hilarious at the end of the day.

The Gang Goes Bowling is by far the magnum opus of this sixteenth season. For the most part, this season of Sunny was confined to just the gang, but this episode blew up in terms of ambition as they brought back all the old side favorites, and the results were magnificent. It is the women against the men here, which led to Dee eventually winning for her team, but nobody watched and cared, which was a classical, fitting conclusion to the episode. Artemis, Gail and Waitress were all quite amusing and so were the reliably repulsive McPoyles.

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Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day is a very idiosyncratic episode for this series as they really went out of their comfort zone with this one. Not only is it almost entirely Dennis-centric, but it’s also pretty much a character study for all of Dennis’s psychoses and neuroses while also being a sophisticated, timely commentary of our co-dependence on smart phone technology and how ultimately most of these gadgets have made things more complicated than intuitive.